7846

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 7846
• Author: American River Management Society
• Title: Editor
• USFW Year: Series
• USFW - Doc Type: 1994
• Copyright Material: NO

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Navajo Reservoir covers other things. The northern San Juan was the wellspring of Anasazi culture. The
Reservoir flooded hundreds of Anasazi sites, ranging from camping grounds to rock art panels to whole villages.
The draw-down of the San Juan, and the change in flow patterns, has also put four endemic fish species on the
endangered species lists. The salinity build-up downstream, to which Navajo Dam contributes, is a runaway
problem.

And yes, there is now a world-class, blue-ribbon fishery on this heavily managed river just below Navajo Dam.
And, blessedly, yes, we can still float the San Juan from Bluff to Mexican Hat down through the Goosenecks
past the mouths of Slickhorn and Grand Gulch. But the San Juan River -- a whole river -- was redefined in less
than a decade.

II. The Third Era in the History of the American West

To be SW'e, the big build-up accomplished some worthy objectives. Farmland has been watered and some farm
communities strengthened. The cities have water. Electricity is spread out to millions of people in homes,
businesses, and hospitals. But now we find increasing numbers of people asking questions: Did we have to do it
on such a scale? Did the cities conserve frrst and then ask for water and energy? Did we care enough for the
water, the land, and the air? And did we care enough for the people, especially Indian people, of the interior West
on whose backs the build-up was accomplished?

The third era began just recently, as those questions and others like them began to be asked in many different
quarters and as we began to get about the serious business of finding ways to answer them.

I believe that years from now people will look back to the late 1980s and early 1990s as a time when our
society began, in a concerted way, to make its stand about this earth and its creatures. By about the mid-1980s,
new data reached the public consciousness -- about global warming, depletion of the ozone layer, and rain forest
destruction. In the American West, endangered species catapulted into public view in an unprecedented way. I
think of the sharpest defining moment as being the Forest Service's draft EIS on the spotted owl, released in
1986. It generated the most comments of any Forest Service EIS ever released. Then, in 1989, the salmon runs
plummeted with the low water in the Columbia. This in the lush Pacific Northwest, our most environmentally
sensitive region. Then the Rio Conference further galvanized opinion and concern.

This causes us to ask why we have entered a new era. One factor is simply the wave of population that bas
entered the region as the rest of the country has reeled the West in with jet air traffic, the interstate highway
system, and the modem, fax, and e-mail. The region's population stood at sixteen million at the end of World
War II. Now it is fifty-seven million. The stresses are all around us. I have mentioned some of them but, for
many people, the impact is more personal -- the added traffic in town, the burgeoning number of bealth hazards
for our children, and the loss of favorite places. Of course, we have seen this play out on the Colorado Plateau.
It no longer wins any awards for God-forsakenness. Among other things, this year or next we will reach an
annual total of thirty million visitor days (twenty million in the national parks) on the Colorado Plateau.

Another reason for a new approacb toward the land and water of the West involves powerful economic forces.
We now understand the drawbacks of the traditional extractive industries. The costs of the impacts on the land
and the rivers are too high, and so too are the traditional subsidies too burdensome for state and national budgets.
A new western economy is emerging -- based on recreation, scaled-back extractive industries, and light industries
that want to settle in this wondrous place -- and this new economic mix is far outstripping the old.

Another hallmark in recent developments has been the return of Indian tribes. They own about four percent of all
land in the West and bave been effectively asserting their rights to sovereignty, religious freedom, natural
resources, and economic development in general. The tribes, wbo are sovereign governments, have become part
of the community of governments, and while many problems remain, they are well on their way toward making
their reservations into the homelands they were originally promised to be.

One of the ironies of American history, then, is that Indian tribes have made the centerpiece of their initiatives
the reservation lands that they once fought so hard against being confined to. Another great historical irony is
that a much larger amount of land -- no less than fifty percent of the whole West -- that was once "leftover" land
is now heartland. The federal public lands, open to all of us, are one of the basic freedoms of Westerners. Tbis

American River Management Society